Good afternoon. In a never-ending bid to refine things here, I'm going to be playing with the formatting of the blog headlines and body for a few days, so please bear with me.

Microsoft says it has restored Hotmail access for some users who temporarily lost all of their email.

Because of CES this week, Leo and I are recording Windows Weekly on a different day and time: Tuesday at 12 noon ET (9 am PT). You can follow along live as always, if you'd like.

Yet another iPhone 4 glitch prevented the phone's alarm from working on New Year's. Apple's oh-so-typical response was to not fix the problem because it will resolve itself in a few days; kudos to them for not blaming the users at least. The good news? Unlike the several biggest problems with the iPhone 4, this one is only a software problem and thus easily fixed.

Jean-Louis Gassee will never get over how Apple jilted him and his BeOS for Steve Jobs and NeXT. Which is understandable. But I've always been fascinated by the guy, and given his history at Apple, his opinions do carry some weight. This week, he told CBS News that Apple was repeating the mistakes of the (Mac) past by refusing to license iOS. And I can't say I agree with that. Plus, let's not forget that the Mac has made huge strides in recent years. No, it's nowhere close to where it was when Gassee was at Apple. But the Mac's turnaround is almost miraculous.

Discuss this Article 2

Licensing iOS (or Mac OSX for that matter) would be disastrous for Apple, because it would show off just how limited and locked their hardware support really is, and it would be impossible to control the experience the way they do. Then they'd be just another OEM.

What I Use

Like many, I was hoping to see a new Lumia flagship before the end of 2014, and while I was pleasantly surprised in some ways by both the Lumia 735 and 830, neither offers the level of performance or best-in-market camera quality I had come to expected from Microsoft/Nokia's high-end devices. So I pulled the trigger on an unlocked Windows Phone flagship that will hopefully take me through at least the first half of this year. Or until Microsoft gets off its low-end fixation and satisfies the needs of its biggest fans....More

It's been a while since the last What I Use, but there haven't been many major changes since late last year: Surface Pro 3 has become my go-to travel companion, I've added a third cellphone line for testing Windows Phone, Android and iPhone side-by-side, and have rotated through some new tablets and other devices. We've also switched from FIOS to Comcast and added to our set-top box collection....More